An insider's view of S.A. politics

Updated 11:33 pm, Tuesday, October 9, 2012

There is a certain reputation that comes from being a consistent “no” vote on high profile measures that go before a city council.

You're not a team player, it will be said. You can't build consensus. And if these votes stem from concern for a constituency that is largely low-income Mexican-American, you're, of course, too Hispanic.

María Antonietta Berriozábal, who was the first Mexican-American woman elected to San Antonio's City Council, has undergone the sort of introspection that these types of assessment thrust on an elected official.

Her thoughts about this, a bevy of other topics and about growing up Mexican-American in San Antonio are in her book, “María, Daughter of Immigrants.” It also tells of her maturation as a local politician, from City Council member to unsuccessful mayoral and congressional candidate.

Those “other topics” on which she writes will instantly resonate if you've been up on San Antonio politics from the 1980s to the present day. Applewhite Reservoir, Alamodome and Fiesta Texas, among them.

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So, let's see. A reservoir approved by the council but which voters rejected. Twice. An Alamodome that never attracted an NFL team and which only had relatively short-term utility as a venue for a National Basketball League team. And an amusement park that, along with a medical center and main University of Texas, San Antonio campus — placed out in what were then the hinterlands — had the effect of inducing sprawl of the kind Berriozábal feared, she wrote.

So, let me offer an alternative suggestion. There can also be some wisdom — and no small amount of principle — in voting “no.”

There was an earlier review of Berriozábal's book elsewhere in this newspaper. But, as a relative newcomer, what interested me most was the author's inside look at San Antonio politics not long after the city jettisoned at-large elections in 1977

Berriozábal, who aspired to be a secretary — was — and ended up a college graduate with a political science degree, got elected to the City Council in a 1981 runoff election. She took the District 1 seat that had been filled by Henry Cisneros, who moved on to become mayor.

That runoff must have been a hoot. She quotes her opponent, police Lt. Alfonso “Al” Peeler, who was explaining why he wouldn't debate her.

“In my culture, a gentleman does not debate a lady.”

To which she replied: “I am asking for a debate, not a duel.” There was no duel or debate, but she won with 55 percent of the vote.

She quickly discerned the intersection of “micro” issues directly affecting her constituents and the “macro” issues that seemed to animate business or development interests.

The Applewhite Reservoir was one of these issues. Water, despite its outsized macro implications, she reasoned, is ultimately one of those micro issues as well because everyone at every level needs it.

She subscribed to the theory that creating the reservoir would start unfettered harmful development over the Edwards Aquifer, hastening its depletion.

Suspicions of larger hidden interests motivating city actions have been evident in issues confronting San Antonio even in the short time I've been here. This indicates the need for some trust-building.

Berriozábal tracks her activism from growing up with immigrant parents of humble means in a San Antonio barrio to a Chicano movimiento that brought her to the realization that things as they have been do not have to be as they are.